Amsterdam-based fintech startup BUX raises 10.6 million euro in a Series C Round from a group of investors. The round was led by by Holtzbrinck Ventures. Velocity Capital and angel investors Arthur Kosten (Booking.com) and Thierry Schaap (BinckBank) also participated. The startup will launch a Seedrs crowdfunding campaign to raise additional funds, offering its user-base of over one million people the opportunity to own shares in the business.

BUX is a trading app for people with little or no experience of market trading. The startup claims that in fact 80% of its users had little to no experience with stock trading before joining the BUX app. By applying gamification principles and adding a social layer to the user experience BUX has turned trading into a game-like and social experience. The app provides initial training for inexperienced users to familiarise themselves with how stocks work before they start trading real money. The company claims to have 1.2 miljoen users in 8 countries, such as the Netherlands, UK and Germany. “We have expanded BUX across Europe country by country. France is the last big European market we want to focus on first”, says Nick Bortot, founder and CEO of BUX, to StartupJuncture. “We will subsequently start expanding into Eastern Europe.”

Making things simple

The new investment doesn’t come as a big surprise. VC’s are keen on investing in startups that create new markets by creating new consumption patterns, instead of fighting for a piece of the (existing) pie. And BUX team under the leadership of founder Bortot have since the founding of the company in 2014 shown that they can deliver. “During my long tenure in the financial industry I saw that a lot of people actually want to trade, but don’t because the more traditional firms don’t appeal to them or because their offerings are too complex”, Bortot says about the genesis of BUX.

Making trading exceedingly easy is also what movivated BUX to jump into offering the possibility to trade in cryptocurrencies. Bortot: “Offering this service perfectly fits into our focus and capabilities: making something quite complex as crypto currencies very simple for the younger demographic, our main customer base.”

BUX aims to use the capital raised to fund primarily product development, focusing on launching mid to long term investing apps. The company just passed the 50-person headcount and plans to add more people to its team, specially developers. The company’s 2020 ambition is to be ‘the single destination’ for short term trading and long term investing.

Entrepreneur | Co-founder @StartupsAnoniem, @StartupJuncture | Partner @StartupDelta | Node1| Tech Blogger| Samir is interested in and loves to work with crazy, dissident, rebel startups that challenge the status quo to make things better. Drop him a line at samir[at]startupjuncture[.]com